Modern Efficiency Displaces Historic Psychiatric Hospital

By CLAUDIA ROWE

Published: May 30, 2001

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y., May 29—
Sharon Chapman was 19 when she started work here at the Hudson River Psychiatric Center a quarter-century ago. Back then, her stepmother, brother and two sisters were also working here, and later her daughter signed on as well.

It may be difficult to imagine why three generations of a family would choose to work in a mental hospital, confronting pain, confusion and intermittent violence. But at the Hudson River center, with its Victorian architecture, bucolic grounds and highbrow pedigree, that kind of long-term loyalty is commonplace. Until this year, when 21st-century efficiencies caught up with the 132-year-old hospital and changed it forever, employees said it felt more like a small town -- with its own dairy, golf course and churches -- than like a state institution for the psychotic.

''Some of the patients who used to be here came when they were teenagers and I was a teenager, so we sort of grew up together,'' said Ms. Chapman, a social-work assistant. She spoke from behind the new circular desk in Ross Pavilion, a standard-looking hospital building that is all that remains of the old center. ''It was like part of a family. Now there's no more village, no more nothing.''

With changes in the philosophy of treatment for the mentally ill that have steadily moved patients out of institutional settings and into group homes since the 1960's, the population of New York's psychiatric hospitals has plummeted from a high of 93,000 in 1955 to about 6,000 today. At Hudson River, there were only a few hundred patients on the 1,000-acre campus by the time Gov. George E. Pataki took office in 1995 and decided to sell it, along with similarly underused hospitals around the state.

Last year, a developer, Arnold Moss, bought most of Hudson River Psychiatric Center's historic property and buildings from the state for $1.9 million, with plans to turn them into an apartment complex and hotel. And last month the staff members completed their move into the Ross building, where they will treat only 160 severely ill patients.

Few who work here disagree with the theory behind the downsizing. Nevertheless, a strong whiff of wistfulness still hangs in the air.

''We have come with one great swoop from the 19th to the 21st century,'' said Roger Christenfeld, the hospital's director of research, as he marched along the stark gray hallways, past small offices that each looked just like the one before. ''It's sort of like a budget motel.''

Mr. Christenfeld, 65, who wears bow ties and has a patrician air, is unabashedly sentimental about the old administration building, where his office had 14-foot ceilings, 10-foot windows, parquet floors and antique etchings.

Founded in 1869 on 1,000 acres of land once owned by the Roosevelt family, the Hudson River Asylum for the Insane, as it was then known, operated on the concept that its patients, most of them from New York City, would heal in a country setting. The English architect Frederick Clarke Withers designed its grand neo-Gothic buildings, and the landscaper Calvert Vaux created tree-lined walkways similar to his earlier work with Frederick Law Olmsted for Central Park in Manhattan. In 1989, the quarter-mile-long main building was declared a national historic landmark.

The hospital had its own farm fields, livestock and slaughterhouse to feed patients; its own bowling alley, ice house, shoe- and cabinet-making shops, bakery, tailoring shop, water and power systems, and even its own morgue, pathologist and churches -- one Presbyterian, one Roman Catholic. For more than a century, the campus and its 111 buildings functioned with minimal need for the outside world, and many patients spent nearly their entire lives there.

For all that, it was not a country club. In a dusty room that serves as the hospital's museum are relics from the center's earliest years. A Utica crib -- a heavy wooden cage suspended by chains in which the troubled would be rocked like babies -- hangs there, and next to it, a Rush tranquilizing chair, in which a patient was strapped to sit indefinitely behind a screen with a bedpan below.

But for Bob Ryder, a therapy aide, such bleak scenes are relics, like the nurses' peaked caps and the white uniforms and black ties that male staff members wore when he joined the hospital in 1976. The routine of his job today, he said, is no match for his memories.

''I enjoyed coming to work much more back then,'' he said. ''We would take patients on picnics to the lakes and stuff. There was just a lot more freedom. We went camping with them. We'd barbecue. The patients could even feed deer out of their hands. It was beautiful.''

In the last few years, however, James R. Regan, the center's executive director, decided that the institution had become perhaps too comfortable, and he began to close recreation programs.

''We're lean and mean,'' he said with a quiet sigh, driving along the gently curving paths that are no longer part of his hospital's property. ''That's what government's all about now.''

The Presbyterian chaplain, the Rev. Carter Gregory, has just moved into the sparse new office he shares in Ross Pavilion with the hospital's Catholic priest, the Rev. James LeBar, a nationally known exorcist. It is a clinical-looking room, with a plastic sign outside that reads Spiritual Care Center.

''My head's still spinning from all the changes,'' Mr. Gregory said. ''The real question is how the patients are coping.''

Only moments before, one of them had hurled a chair in the day room, shattering a partition window. Hospital officials said this was a rare occurrence, and attributed the outburst to agitation over being moved to a new setting. But some employees say otherwise.

''I can't keep up with them anymore, they put out so much glass,'' said a janitor covering the window's spiderweb cracks with duct tape. ''It happens quite frequently around here.''

Dr. Regan heard the alarms through the intercom in his own new office, a former ward that still has windows with tiny steel-framed panes of glass to prevent suicide jumps.

''Code Green! Code Green!'' a male voice shouted, and Dr. Regan grimaced, dreading what that would mean: bed restraints to quiet the unruly patient. He said he despised such methods, and proudly announced that by trying to react early to potential crises, his staff had not needed them for an entire month this spring.

Photos: Roger Christenfeld, above, the research director at the Hudson River Psychiatric Center, and Sharon Chapman, a social work assistant, are nostalgic about the former site. (Photographs by Chris Ramirez for The New York Times)